Dream Comes True at Memorial Stadium

He was 20 years old, two years out of high school and driving a tractor. He drove to work in the middle of the night and waited for the truckers to come off the road with their loads of soft drink and whiskey bottles, and then he loaded the bottles on his truck and distributed them to dealerships around Baltimore.

One night, he was sitting in a diner across the street, waiting for the truckers, drinking coffee and reading the morning paper. A one-paragraph brief buried deep in the sports section caught his attention: the Orioles were having a tryout camp the next morning up at Cecil County Community College. “Hmmm, should I? “ he thought, knowing full well it was a pipe dream.

Two years earlier, he had been no more than a mediocre high school pitcher, not even making the varsity until his senior year, when he had a 5-2 record and impressed exactly no scouts.

His fastball was not fast; his best pitch’was a big, roundhouse curve, which had worked against neophyte high school batters but never would have fooled those in college or minor league baseball.

He had gone to a local community college planning to play baseball, but when some high school players he knew walked into the room on orientation day, he quit. On the spot. Those others players were too good. “I did not have outstanding physical tools then,” he said.

In the two years that he had driven a truck, however, those two years between the night of his high school graduation and that night when he read about the tryout camp, he had grown three inches and gained 20 pounds.

Some old friends from high school had seen him in a store one day and told him about this summer league team, and he showed up and started pitching again and discovered that he had a fastball that hummed.

So, as he sat there in that diner in the middle of the night, drinking his coffee and waiting for the truckers to come in from West Virginia, he’decided to go to the tryout. It wasn’t that he was unhappy with his lot. He was the son of a trucker, and he planned to catch on with United Parcel Service when he was old enough.

“I was working a job, figuring that that was what I would do for the rest of my life,” he said. “I was a perfectly happy camper. But I didn’t even have to take off from work to go the tryout camp. It was on a Saturday. So I figured, ‘Why not?’ ”

The next day at the tryout, among the usual sea of luckless dreamgrs who show up at these camps wearing tennis shoes and carrying tattered gloves, he pitched three strong innings and was asked back to an invitation-only tryout. He pitched well again, then again a third time, in an All-Star game the Orioles sponsored. But no pro scouts called. The Orioles forgot about him. The only call came from the coach at the Community College of Baltimore.

“I had to make my mind up right there,” he said. “I was working full time and I had a lot of bills to pay. I had to’decide whether I wanted to take a chance of losing my car and being financially strapped, all so I could go to college and play baseball and try to get drafted and be a pro one day. I decided it was worth a try.”

His daily schedule was exhausting. He took classes in the morning, played ball in the afternoon, went home to eat dinner and study, and then, when everyone else was going to sleep, drove back downtown to the Maryland National Bank building, where he worked in the computer room from midnight until 8 a.m., fixing automatic teller machines. Sleep? He caught a few hours when he could.

He played two years at the Community College of Baltimore, and in the second he went 11-0 and led the team to the junior college world series. There, however, he flopped miserably, giving up 10 runs in two innings in one game and balking in the winning run in another.

When he got home, he learned that, once again, his name had not been called in the major league draft. It was a discouraging day, one of his worst. “I thought 11-0 would be enough,” he said.

He was beginning to think about giving up baseball and going back to work. Two days later, the coach of one of the better local amateur teams called and asked if he wanted to pitch that night; the regular starter was sick. He said sure. He pitched a two-hitter, thinking nothing of it. There was one man watching in the bleachers.

The next day, the phone rang. It turned out that that man in the bleachers, whom he had thought was one of the other players’ father, was a scout for the PittsburghPirates. A contract was offered, and, minutes later, the phone rang again: it was the coach of the local amateur team, who also was a scout for the Orioles and knew that Pittsburgh was calling to offer a contract.

The young pitcher suddenly had a decision to make, but it was not difficult. “I had made up my mind that, if it ever got to that, I would go with the first contract offered me,” he said. Besides, truth be known, his pride still was hurt from how the Orioles had snubbed him after thetryout camp. So he signed a contract with Pittsburgh. There was no signing bonus. No guarantee. Nothing. Just a piece of paper with his name on it.

Eight years later, after being released once and traded once, after a career spent almost entirely in the minors, a life of long bus rides and cheap hotels and coming home for the winter to live in his mobile home near Baltimore and drive a truck again, he won his first major league game Tuesday night.